Why meeting with Putin may just give Trump a popularity boost

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John A. Tures does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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By setting a summit with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump is hoping to smooth over bad relations between the United States and Russia. He may also be thinking about benefiting in the polls and at the ballot box.

Peace is at hand – elections, too

These words – spoken at a Washington, D.C. press conference on Oct. 26, 1972, by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger about the status of the Paris Peace Conference negotiations with North Vietnam – are said to have sealed the re-election bid of Richard Nixon.

And yet, it is the diversionary theory of war that is well-established in the field of international relations. Based on theories of conflict by Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser, scholars contend that when a leader is facing internal trouble, fighting an external foe can provide a “rally ‘round the flag” effect from a burst of patriotism that accompanies war. Sometimes it’s even possible to make a foreign rival the scapegoat for a mess at home.

While the media began to apply the theory to nearly every use of force, many scholars tried and failed to find strong corroborating evidence that leaders started conflicts as a diversion. Some found more evidence that conflicts short of war, like verbal threats, were used as diversions in U.S. foreign policy.

Distracting the public with peace

So while picking fights overseas as a way of drawing a nation together may not be as common as we think, could peace be a better political strategy?

Scholars analyzing the Democratic Peace Theory argue that when given the chance, people vote for peace. Authoritarian regimes are the ones who drag the public into bloody conflicts. But this theory has no shortage of critics. Political scientist Barbara Yoxon notes that there has been a recent rise in the number of phantom democracies that combine elements of democracy and autocracy, hosting elections that are often unfair, and fail to deliver basic freedoms to the people. But true democracies rarely go to war because the government is responsive to the people, who want peace.

North Korea and Russia

Shortly before President Trump launched his peace initiative in North Korea, he was sitting at a 40.25 percent average in the polls. That climbed to 44 percent over the two days the story first broke. The effect only lasted a few days, but those polls crept up as the Singapore summit approached, culminating in an average of nearly 45 percent according to RealClearPolitics’ polls of Trump’s approval ratings. Some surveys indicated support at 49 percent before the furor over the detention of immigrant children brought those numbers back down.

Is peace a sleight of hand?

So should we expected that meeting with Putin will make Trump more popular?

That may depend on whether the public believes the diplomacy was designed for a true reconciliation of hostilities – or merely a ploy to win re-election, help his party in the midterms, or cement his legacy in the history books.